China’s Levitating Cars Video Explained

A few days ago, a video showing at least three vehicles levitating at an intersection in China went viral on YouTube and social media. The incident took place at a busy intersection in Xingtai, about 250 miles from Beijing. Internet theorists started putting forward all the possible reasons behind the mysteriously levitating cars. Who was the culprit? A supernatural force with road rage? A pedestrian with psychic powers? The video does show cars lifted up by an unseen force.

Bystanders shocked to see gravity-defying levitating cars

The footage was captured by CCTV cameras in mid-November. You could see a minibus rising up in the air and then collapsing on its side, while two other vehicles lift off of the road. Everyone is trying hard to figure out what happened. What makes the footage even more weird is that none of the levitating cars ever touched each other. Shocked bystanders begin running away, but one pedestrian treated the whole thing as if nothing had happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJwLKDu2Pj8

Now the mystery has been solved. And the explanation is much simpler than you might have thought. The gravity-defying accident was caused by a mislaid road maintenance cable. It got tangled up in the spinning sweepers of a passing street cleaner vehicle at the wrong time. It caused the vehicle to be lifted up, snagging the other nearby vehicles.

No one was hurt

Right before the tail of the first minibus rises into the air, look carefully and you’ll see a faint black-like line to the left of the screen. It was a thick wire that accidentally fell on the road and tangled up the vehicles, lifting them in the air. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the accident.

A driver of the van told the state-run CCTV news service, “I was driving slowly straight ahead. All of a sudden, I was lifted up. The street cleaner car snagged on the wire. The wire just so happened to be underneath our car and it sent us flying.”